Chapter Text
Starlight found her eyes glancing towards the clock at the corner of the projection screen for the second time in the last 2 minutes.
She was to the point where she could barely stand it, the frantic game of knowing she could be caught at any moment. Of knowing that Homelander more than suspected her of undermining this cruel joke of a team and it was only a matter of time until he found an excuse to kill her, and there would be nothing Maeve or anyone else could do to save her. But the more nervous she became, the more her heartrate increased and the more adrenaline she released into the air, making her more and more anxious that Homelander would pick up on it. Surely, he must have already.
“Next time that happens, I want you to come to me. Directly.” The man in question continued to lecture them about the apparent slight breach in data. “I’m not pointing fingers, but some of you don’t have the best track record when it comes to keeping certain things private.” Starlight refuses to look up to meet his eyes, but she’s sure he’s staring right at her. Passive aggressive bullshit is what she comes to expect of him these days, but so long as it stays passive she can weather it.
“I mean, c’mon.” Honelander parts his clasped hands in a gesture she knows he intends to look friendly. “ We’re a family here. Families handle things between each other. If there’s an issue, of course I wanna do my best to help to fix it.”
Starlight resists the urge to outwardly scoff. Coming to Honelander about any sort of ‘issue’ was suicide- whether it be physical or professional suicide would likely depend on his mood.
She resorts to opening her phone under the table to play that mindless candy game she’d downloaded last week in a last ditch effort to calm herself and attempt to bring her emotions down form the edge. A few more taps and she could unlock the next level, and she then wanders over to her official twitter.
“Hey, you might wanna pay attention little lady. Just saying, so long as you’re here this does concern you.” Homelander suddenly by the side of her chair nearly causes her to jump out of her skin. “In fact, if I’m talking at all, that should concern you.”
“I-” Starlight falters under the weight of his gaze, floundering for anything she can say.
“Why don’t you share with the class?”
“Share…what?” Annie tries to smile, to feign innocence though she knows it’s hopeless.
“ I figure if you can’t stop scrolling for five goddamn seconds, then it must really be something you need to share with the rest of us.” Homelander smiles, flashing his predatory sharp teeth at her, per the usual.
“I-wha- Nothing. It was nothing. I was just checking my Twitter,” She searches for something, anything that would make this seem reasonable. “Was looking for some comments I saw earlier that I wanted to draw some attention to and got carried away. I’m sorry.” She looks away.
Homelander presses his hand against a section of the table nearest to her, and releases a hidden drawer. He gives her a neat little smile as he orders her to place her phone inside it with a simple gesture of his hand. Cheeks burning with humiliation, fury, and fear, Starlight complies and places her phone inside.
Her penitent gaze slides into a glare that she holds up until he goes to sit down. She sees Homelander pull at the front of his uniform, the tiniest grimace barely registering across his face. God, she wonders if he even sleeps in that thing. She wishes him the worst kind of chafing and rash from it, before she realizes that she needs to think much much darker than that if she even intends to work against him and everything he truly stands for.
The rest of the meeting walked the outlandish line between unbearably tense and insufferably boring. When finally liberated by dismissal, Starlight walks out while everyone disperses quickly, not even Maeve sticks around to offer some begrudgingly sage advice. She doesn’t know where Maeve goes- she doesn’t know where anyone goes, no one ever talks about it. All she knows is she needs air, she needs to get out, these meetings always leave her in a state.
As she returns to her apartment that she can barely even call her own, she immediately changes out of her uniform. The adrenaline slowly starts wear down and Annie takes a few measured breaths as herself. She needs to talk to Hughie, of course he can’t help, not really. But god, she just can’t be alone with this right now. She needs to get out of here, she needs to go to dinner, a movie, something. She needs him to make her laugh, and tell her without using his words that her humanity isn’t slowly slipping away.
Then she realizes it, patting her pockets down frantically, adrenaline spiking right back up. Her phone. She left her fucking phone. She hopelessly shakes her uniform, wishing that by the grace of God, by some miracle it could be in there, but no. Of course it’s not; it was still stowed away in the drawer like that motherfucking asshole told her to. She knew right where it was.
“Goddammit.” She turns her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head. Every spare minute she spent in this tower beyond what was necessary felt dangerous, and without her phone it felt even worse.
Annie frantically runs back to the meeting hall, it had only been 10 or so minutes since they’d left but it somehow feels like an eternity. She sprints down the hallway that leads to the meeting room, but before she can take a step further a voice stops her.
“ I have another sample I’m sending tonight, you brainless fucks.” Homelander’s voice cuts through the metal doors of their meeting room.
Oh shit. Annie realizes he must have her phone, that he plans to turn it in for information. She’d been playing this cat and mouse game for too long now, her luck had finally run out. This was it. As she reaches the minute crack in the doors and peers inside, she’s somewhat surprised he hasn’t just blasted her yet, he must hear some part of her by now as her heart threatens to pound out of her chest.
Instead she finds Homelander, phone pressed to his ear still sitting in his seat at the head of the table, notably not holding her phone- but some sort of clear plastic vial instead. He taps the vial on the table absently as the person on the other line must be speaking.
“Yeah? Well, I don’t give a shit. Call him in too.”
Annie sees him then remove his gloves to reach up and open the top of his uniform, exposing his chest and upper torso. It was more or less what she expected- well sculpted, not the brute muscle that his strength would suggest but lean and well-cut just the same. However, Annie wasn’t looking at much else beyond the obvious swelling in his pectoral tissue. Veins sprouted across his chest, radiating outwards from what looked to be very painful and tender nipples. His chest still looked masculine albeit now with some horribly botched implants. She’d never seen anything quite like it.
Annie balked at the strange sight, but couldn’t drag her eyes away.
“Don’t you give me that bullshit excuse,” She could hear the quivering anger in his voice as he cuts off whoever was speaking on the other line. “No, no. The fact is you don’t know so you better get me someone who does.”
And then things got impossibly stranger as Homelander brought the vial up to a nipple. She could see him grimace as he squeezed it between his fingers and what appeared to be a white milky liquid dripped into it. Annie knew she was going to get herself killed for witnessing this, but like a car crash in slow motion, she couldn’t look away. If he caught her now, she’s absolutely sure he wouldn’t even hesitate this time. He’d find some way to cover it up; somehow, someway.
“And I’m gonna keep leaving these fucking things in your office until you figure it out.” He reseals the small vial before setting it on the table and immediately sets about covering himself up again, with haste indicative of shame.
“That’s your fucking job.” Homelander simultaneously brings his phone down with a slam against the table and fiercely mutters “Cunts.” before drawing his gaze back up towards the rest of the room, towards the open door she was currently peeping through.
Annie doesn’t breathe as she snaps her body back away from the doors. She takes a step back, knowing there was a chance it could be her last, and another and then another. Finally she can’t contain herself and breaks into an all-out sprint down the hall, her sneakers softly squeaking against the pristine marble floors in her mad scramble. Her phone was the furthest thing from her mind as she slammed her fingers into the elevator buttons until it finally opens and she can throw herself inside.
Taking shaking gulps of air she spends the ride waiting for the carriage to shutter to a grinding halt, for the ceiling to be sliced open or the cable to snap and drop her hundreds of feet down the shaft. But it doesn’t. After an eternity it goes from 99 to ground level where it lets her off, but she doesn’t stop her frantic pace until she feels the night air touch her face. Until she can look up at the tower, look up at the lights from various offices as she fights for air.
Annie had no idea what she’d just witnessed or what to make of it, but she keeps it to herself. She has no way to meet up with Hughie or anyone else, so she just walks the streets around the square, hugging close to the streetlamps. The electric hum is comforting, a warm blanket in which she can shroud herself in. She doesn’t dare to go back until she sees all the lights fade from the top of the tower.
She had no idea if he’d seen her or if he’d heard her, and somehow that made every subsequent interaction with him that much more terrifying than they already were.
. . .
She manages to stuff the events from that night away in some compartment at the back of her mind, waiting to be forgotten. But, weeks later, it finds a way to push itself back into her life as Maeve approaches her in the hallway. She’d just returned from an interview with more loaded questions than she had safe answers for, but all that preoccupation dissipates when she sees the wan look on Maeve’s face as she draws closer.
“Homelander’s looking for you.”
The words fall from Maeve’s mouth like a terminal prognosis.
“I-” Maeve starts before stopping herself with a sigh. “He’s in the meeting room.” Her tone bleeds into the heavy unspoken silence between them, remorse, regret, and fear.
“I’ll …go get changed first.” It’s all Starlight can think to say after she digests the indigestible. She doesn’t know why she feels the obligation to do this out of uniform, maybe it’s because on some level she believes because he’ll have a harder time explaining what he’s done. But she knows it won’t really matter in the end.
It passes in a blur, the uniform comes off and Annie January is left staring at herself, in the ultraluxe mirror in the soulless luxury bathroom of the apartment that has never felt like home. Sure, she could run- but he’d find her. There’s no way he wouldn’t. She could run to Hughie and everyone, but she’d only end up exposing them to be killed too, and everything they’d fought for would be for naught.
There was no way out. But at least she won’t die in their colors.
“Starlight,” Homelander gives her his best wolf’s grin as he looks up when she pushes the door open to the meeting hall. It fades somewhat as he sees Annie, plain-Jane Annie January in her flannels and jeans standing before him. “I’m glad you got my message. Here, have a seat.”
When she doesn’t offer anything in response besides unsteadily seating herself in the chair she usually sits in, he continues.
“I can see don’t waste any time getting out of uniform. You know, that kinda fits with the theme I’m seeing here. I couldn’t help but wonder why that is, why it is I get the feeling you don’t really want this.” He pauses again, but Annie refuses to look directly into his gaze.
“I couldn’t help but wonder, what it is you’re doing here. Why you’re here.”
She can’t do this. She thought she could, but she can’t. She can’t wait for death like this, she needs him to cut to the point- the point in question being her. She needs him to do what he’s going to do and get it over with.
“Uhm,” She takes a shaky uneven breath. “I’m not really sure what you’re saying.”
“Listen Starlight,” Homelander sighs with a shake of his head and turns his eyes towards the ceiling. “I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, I really did. I thought, surely-” He breaks with a rough sound that could’ve been a laugh if it wasn’t so forced while pinching his brow to tell her what he really meant to say. “Surely she can’t be that stupid. Dumb enough to think I wouldn’t notice. It’s insulting to my intelligence, it hurts. It really does.”
She goes to take a breath to speak but he scoffs at her before she can even begin to interject.
“I mean, c’mon, the only reason I haven’t melted you into the floor is because I want you to watch what I do to them first.” His eyes darken as she makes the mistake of looking him in the eye. It’s worse than she thought, being stared down by the roiling gaze of murderous intent.
“If you touch them, I’ll make sure everyone knows about,” Annie stops herself, self-preservation instincts kicking in, unsure if she’s really going to go there or not but then she blows right past it. He’d ignited a white -hot defensive rage inside her. She lowers her voice to a dangerous whisper, leaning across the table. “I know what you did that night. I saw it. I know what’s happening to you, it’s not natural- it’s dangerous. What if the public found out about that? ”
Homelander snorts a response to her threats as he breaks into a predatory grin, his eyes brimmed with amusement before leaning as far back in the chair as it would go. “Well I’ll be, Starlight. First that one kid; what’s-his-name and now Deep? I honestly never took you for such a little whore.”
“Excuse me?” She’s honestly affronted for a moment, before she catches herself and remembers who she’s dealing with. “What?”
“Obviously you wanted to get more dirt so you just sucked Flipper’s dick a little harder and got him to spill all his little secrets to you.” Homelander just sounds like he’s teaching a math lesson to an unbelievably slow child, before he leans violently across the table “But let me make one thing clear here; I know you don’t have shit. There’s no way you could’ve kept your little cocksucking mouth shut if you actually thought you had anything of value. That dolphin fucker doesn’t know anything and neither do you.”
“Deep? Huh? What’re you talking about?” This time there is no need for acting or faked surprise as Annie’s abject terror quickly turns to genuine confusion. “I’m talking about your chest; when you took a sample of whatever that…stuff is.”
Homelander’s expression changes in stages, his eyes growing comically wide as his mouth twitched in rough spasms that eventually contorted his entire face into a tight unreadable expression.
“The what?” He whispers, his face not quite able to reach the menacing affable grin that was typical for him to mask himself in, despite what appeared to be his best efforts. She found that the resulting unhinged expression probably scared her worse than his usual sneer ever could.
“The stuff you have going on with your chest, that’s what I was talking about. I- I didn’t mean to see it.” Annie blurts out as she stands abruptly, sending the chair sliding backwards as she makes to step away. “Look, I don’t know what you thought I was talking about but I swear I don’t know anything abou-” That’s as far as she gets before he literally flies across the table and grabs her by the throat.
“You sneaky little bitch.” His feet return to the ground a second later, but hers do not. As he holds her a foot off the ground Annie scrambles against the iron vice that is his grip on her neck, desperately clawing at his hands and kicking her legs to no avail.
“You know,” Homelander smiles at her, menacing grin returning with a vengeance. It dawns on her that he hasn’t squeezed hard enough to instantly snap her neck. He wants this to be slow, he wants her to listen to him. “I’m getting real sick of everyone lying to me, all of the time. Those twats at R&D, they don’t know shit. Just like you. They kept acting like they knew shit, kept telling me they just needed a little more time to figure things out.”
His lips are shiny and red with spit and rage as his tone devolves into unrestrained shouting. “Then they finally told me the truth; which is that they have no idea. They don’t have the first fucking clue!” She feels his hand tightening until she’s sure her neck will give way under the pressure.
“I can help.” Annie hears herself say as her vision blurs and swims. Homelander’s vibrant blue irises is all she can focus on to ground herself as color seems to leak away from her field of vision.
“What?” The grip on her throat slackens to just short of crisis level.
“I can help.”
“You?” The deranged fury in his expression quickly slides into his familiar condescending smirk as he scoffs at her. “How?”
She closes her eyes and tries to gasp in enough air in to make herself understood. “Put me down and I’ll show you.”
Homelander’s smirk only widens as his grip strengthens faintly, there was no doubt in her mind now that he wanted this to be slow. He was showing restraint only because he must, on some level, deeply enjoy this.
Annie finds she has just enough air to croak words at him, futilely appealing to his humanity. “I mean, I just found out about that stuff. Compound V. My mom always told me it was God that chose me, God gave me my powers. It was all bullshit. I don’t know how long you were on it, but I’m guessing your parents must’ve started early with you too.”
“You could say that.” For a moment his gaze turns into something soft, like he’s lost under the weight of his own thoughts. “But I’m the only living pediatric record holder, they tested the limit of administration with me. And look at me now- it made me a God.”
“It could’ve killed you.” And of all the places Annie thought she would vent her emotions about Compound V and her debauched childhood, it wasn’t a foot off the ground hanging by the whims of a narcissistic lunatic.
“I mean yeah,” He simply shrugs her appeals to his humanity off. “but to achieve their greatest success, of course there had to be risks.”
“But think about the fact that they didn’t know and someone was willing to do it anyway-” She fights for her words with a sputter, still pleading with him as she paws against the hand on her throat. “I don’t think my mom really knew for sure it wouldn’t kill me either, I kind of try not to think about that. I don’t know why they weighed our lives like that, you didn’t get to make a choice either.”
She feels his grip slacken by the tiniest of increments. Her mind buzzes, desperate for air, desperate to tell him anything that might make him let go.
“I can fix it.” She’s not sure why she tells him this again, but to her surprise in what she can only describe as a short-lived miracle, he acquiesces.
Annie feels her feet touch the floor but she quickly loses the battle to keep them there as she falls to her knees, gasping for breath. The world narrows down to her and sweet unfettered access to oxygen for mere moments before she looks up to see him looking down at her. She knows what this is, Homelander is just toying with her. Of course she can’t fix it, she knows he knows that, he just wants to keep the cat and mouse game going for a little while longer. She desperately tries to think of something, anything she can do here-maybe if she stalls long enough someone will happen by the meeting room, although she doubts even an audience would stop him now.
But Annie, all pluck and grace and old-navy flannel shirts doesn’t throw in the towel here, she decides that she needs to buy herself some time to think of her next course of action. A precarious hope rises in her as she rises back to her feet. Maybe she can find some way out of this, maybe there’s still something she hasn’t thought of yet.
“Take off your suit, I gotta see something first.” She casually gestures at his star spangled top, as if this were a completely ordinary request. “I need to see if it is what I think it is, the thing that one guy was talking about.” Annie tries to sound like she has the faintest idea of whatever the fuck she’s doing. There was no ‘one guy’ of course, she’s pulling this entirely out of her ass.
He levels her with a stare, and she knows this is it. This is the moment when his eyes will power up and just slice her where she stands. But then his hands come up and he begins peeling the top of his uniform along the red line that crossed his torso down to his belt, opening it to expose his chest to her. He’s playing along, prolonging what she fully expects will be a very long drawn out death for her. She realizes he must’ve been thinking of killing her for some time now, especially if he’s patient enough to want to savor it, the smell and sound of her fear, even as he exposes his bare flesh to her.
She sees him then, just like before. The breast tissue is engorged and badly swollen once again, but now she feels a strange sensation come over her, like a faint buzzing in her mind growing louder and louder as she stares at it. Her eyes fixate on a tender looking nipple and she feels her mouth fill at the sight of it. Something clicks and suddenly Annie has the answer to it all; the buzzing grows into a static that drowns out every coherent thought but one. As if there was something biologically ingrained into her so deep, she could feel it in the farthest reaches of her altered DNA, calling to her. She responds to the sweet siren’s song before she even realizes what she’s doing, before anything in her mind can even formulate that this isn’t right, that there’s something very wrong with this.
She doesn’t even process what’s happening until it’s too late, until she’s leaned forward and wrapped her lips around one of his swollen buds, the heat of his skin a sudden shock against her tongue. Her blanked out mind hardly registers it. Almost instinctually Annie pulls her cheeks in to gain suction, and immediately feels the hot liquid flood into her mouth.
“What the fuck are you-” Homelander wrenches his grip into her shoulders, but just as Annie can feel his fingers digging into her bones, his grip slackens before he can make to pry her away.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck.” His hands on her shoulders remain, like he wants to pry her away but just can’t quite bring himself to do it.
Initially she steels herself against the taste of it, taking quick gulps to slide it from her lips to her throat with minimal contact as fast as possible. Expecting it to be acrid, bitter, like most other secretions she’d experienced- but it’s not. Annie savors the taste of it for a moment, it’s rich and sweet and absolutely amazing. It’s like the leftover milk after she was done with the frosted flakes she was only allowed to have at church camp.
Incensed by the flavor, she sucks harder and she feels Homelander’s hands slowly come up to hold her face.
“God,” She can hear each measured, shuddering breath he takes through clenched teeth. Then as if his legs have suddenly stopped being able to hold his weight, Homelander slides down against the wall behind them, taking her down with him. “That feels amazing.”
Annie continues sucking, drowning out each euphoric exhalation Homelander makes into her golden crown. He was clearly enjoying the sensation of her actions, but to her it wasn’t sexual in any way. It was something entirely in a league if its own, something she didn’t know existed until now. She felt fulfilled in ways she didn’t even know she could be, close to how Hughie made her feel; when she’d get warmer and warmer until the pleasure inside her would release in waves of heat and light. But this transcended any kind of perversion, like having her cup overflowing. She felt pure and clean, even as her body straddled his hips and vaguely humped against him, her mind was buzzing with warm static and the need to pull more and more of him into her.
“I’m getting squished by this goddamn-” He interrupts the flow as he effortlessly lifts her with one hand off of his hips. “Hold on.” He mutters while furiously adjusting his uniform underneath her. The faint clicking of a buckle breaks the spell and suddenly the innocent warm feeling twists to a sickly perverted distortion that churns low in her gut.
Annie jumps back with a wet pop as his actions threaten to turn this unknowable sensation into something very familiar, too familiar. She knew he was aroused just by hearing him, but hardly registered until now. It was something else entirely to see it, to be exposed to it. She looks down at him, at where he’d wrestled the lower half of his uniform down to his thighs and exposed his obscenely tented tight red briefs before turning her gaze back to his face. She wonders how he must see her, milk dripping from her wet lips down to her chin with the wide dark eyes of a rabbit ready to run, frozen in the gaze of a rabid beast.
But instead of devouring her, he begs her to devour him as he forces her head back into his chest and smushes her face against him. “Oh god ,don’t stop- don’t you fucking stop.”
“Starlight,” He whines at her and she knows when he says Starlight like that, he doesn’t mean her alter ego anymore. He means her in every sense of the word, but her lips still don’t move.
“Starlight.” This one is a warning.
“I’m not Starlight.” She mouths into his chest, barely able to breathe against the force he’s using to crush her against him. Starlight is good and pure, Starlight wouldn’t do something like this.
“I don’t care who you are,” He pants, petulant and delirious with denied gratification. “put your fucking mouth back on it.”
She still remains frozen in place, dimly aware that he might finally kill her now. There was never any way out of this, Annie knew she was only prolonging the inevitable. But if he killed her now, that would put an end to all of this and Annie can’t tell what he wants more in this moment.
“Annie- Annie January. You fucking bitch.” Homelander growls at her, even using her given name like he’s trying to play by her rules, almost. He crushes her harder still against himself and after what feels like an eternity of overwhelming pressure she hears him say in the most begrudgingly muted voice possible, a murmur of a “Please.”
That’s enough to do it for her, her mouth already craves the taste of him, begging her to latch onto his other full and neglected pectoral. This time she latches with fervor, like an attack. Like she’d fully owned what she was doing and fully intends to unapologetically drain him dry. Something so sweet and wonderful had no right coming from him, she wanted to take it all for herself. She is still seated in his lap as she feasts on him, feeling full in ways she never knew she was voraciously empty. Later when she came to her senses, she might use that as an excuse- there must be some chemical property in him that she was responding to, something completely unknown.
When she shifts her hips forward in his lap, she only does it as a means of readjusting herself to get a better latch, to drain the last of him. But that’s apparently all it takes for him.
“Oh fuck, fuck you Starlight,” Homelander grunts through clenched teeth into her hair before suddenly grabbing the small of her back to roughly press her down into him. “fuck-” The grip he has on her threatens to snap her in half, but instead it dissipates as he makes a mess of his briefs. She can feel the warmth seeping through the fabric of her jeans.
She has drained him dry in every sense of the word, but has little time to bask in the warm glow of satisfaction and sated feeling. As quickly as it had come over her, the spell is lifted. The buzzing in her mind quiets, the glow fades and leaves her with only the weight of whatever-the-fuck just happened.
What the absolute fuck did she just do.
Annie can’t comprehend it, she can’t even replay it in her mind because she literally cannot picture it. But, stranger still, she’s notably not dead. She nearly trips over herself as she steps back, shellshocked but riding the high of still somehow being alive. He won’t kill her, not right now at least, of that she feels fairly certain.
“If you tell anyone about this so help me god,” Homelander sounds almost as shocked as she feels, still catching his breath.
“If you tell anyone about this so help you god.” She only realizes what an absolutely idiotic thing that was to say to him after it had already left her mouth, but she can’t think straight- not after what she’s just done.
“You think you can speak to me that way, you little cunt?” Homelander idly threatens from where he still remains prone and somewhat breathless against the wall in front of her.
Annie takes another step back. Still not dead. She makes a break for it, fully expecting the consequences of her actions to come crashing down on her any second now. But it would appear she has survived their encounter, and she’s not even the one who needs a change of underwear. It’s a sick, twisted and dangerous line of thinking, but she knows Homelander is going to have redress himself and feel his sticky shame all the way back to his penthouse suite.
She wonders what he could be thinking. If anything. The man seemed to do dangerously little of it, at least from her perspective- mostly acting on impulse and whims. However, she figures the less she knows about his mind- the better. He was a plague walking among humanity, twisting and perverting every living thing he came in contact with from the inside out. Annie will refuse to think anything further of him, this moment, or anything from this afternoon in the coming days.
She will run back to her apartment, brush her teeth and cleanse herself with mouthwash to purge herself of the taste of him. But it will be to no avail, she’ll still feel him there.
Hughie will text her to ask her to meet up and of course she’ll go, scrambling for any sense of normalcy to cling to. He’ll take her to lunch, then ask her why she hasn’t touched her food and she’ll implode a little. She’ll mutter “Oh sorry, big lunch actually, not hungry.” and shake her head as part of her dies inside. But then she’ll move on, a few hours with Hughie and making plans and she will be able to build a wall around the entire incident. She prided herself in that, compartmentalizing everything into nice neat little rows, she keeps the messy upsetting no-touchy box of things in her mind far away from herself, and even further away from the untarnished radiance of Starlight.
Life goes on. Slowly, surely, dangerously, life in Vought Tower hums steadily onwards.
Until a week later, at 3am, she gets a knock at her front door.
She already knows who it is- she just doesn’t know why he’s come. This could be it, finally the end, but- it’s 3am and as she drags herself to the door, she just can’t seem to work up the adrenaline spike to do the possible finality of her life any justice. The knock repeats itself but is abruptly cut off by her opening the door.
It’s him, of course it is and he’s also notably still in uniform, because he’s Homelander. “Starlight.” He acknowledges her by way of greeting. As if this were all very routine, and perhaps it would be; were it not 3am and she somewhat less familiar with his penchant for homicide without warning.
“I uh,” Homelander glances down the hall- both ways, before leaning against the doorframe to get himself closer to her. If she didn’t know better she’d almost say he looked nervous. “Do you think you could do that again?”
She can only blink impassively at him until he decides to continue.
“See thing is,” He folds his arms and leans in closer still, smiling as if he can charm his way into this. “I’m really gonna need you to do that again.” He says it like he’s forcing her, like she can’t say no.
But she knows what this is, he needs her to do this for him. He needs her. The mere concept of it defies logic, but she feels herself salivate just the same. She hungers for it; the kind of dangerous high she’d felt before, she recognizes it now. Her mouth waters when she thinks of the taste of him, and the power he’d unwittingly given her. Annie pauses for just a moment longer before she steps back and lets him in.
As the door closes behind them, another compartment in her mind slowly begins to open.